I've been meaning to rename this blog for ages. The whole PuppiesAndIceCream thing was originally just a dumb joke from when I renamed the blog the first time, and I never meant for it to stick. But being the unimaginative person that I am, I never came up with another name, and so it has stayed.

Am I the only one majorly annoyed by VMWare's support policy (or lack there-of) for VMWare on a Vista host? Apparently EMC's stance is that in order to run VMWare on a Vista host, we need to wait for VMWare 6.0. This presents several problems:

Ever since upgrading to Vista and Office 2007, I've had a really annoying problem with Outlook 2007. After running for a couple days, the UI would lose the ability to repaint itself correctly. It would glitch out and start drawing large blank regions or garbage. It smacked of a resource leak, but caused by what? I tried everything I could think of - upgrading the video drivers, disabling add-ins...nothing fixed the problem.

One of my co-workers was struggling with a strange problem recently - he installed SQL Server 2005 (with Analysis Services 2005), but the Business Intelligence Studio application didn't install. If you haven't seen it, BI Studio is really just a special version of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, with Analysis Services-specific projects and editors. What he saw was that even though the SQL Server installer claimed to have installed it, and even created a shortcut for it, the actual devenv.exe executable wasn't installed (the shortcut pointed to an invalid path). I'd installed SQL Server many a time, and never seen this problem. A search of the MSDN forums turned up this helpful topic, with the following advice from 'softie Dan Jones: